President Obama is finally wrapping himself in the Constitution, engaging conservatives in a constitutional dialogue, and moving to retake the Constitution for progressives, writes Simon Lazarus, senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, in the New Republic.

Lazarus argues that President Obama's Constitution draws on the spirit of 1776 to promote a progressive agenda, and not one that mandates just small government. But President Obama's Constitution also "echoes that of the Reconstruction Congresses, which enacted the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments." In particular, Lazarus says that President Obama sees the Constitution as authorizing Congress "to prevent private interference with the exercise of individual rights"--restricting certain private acts, and not, as some conservatives would have it, only restricting government.

Thus, in addition to yoking contemporary progressive goals to the vision of the Revolutionary War generation, Obama's emergent constitutional canon appears bent on revitalizing a cornerstone of the Civil War era's more unequivocally progressive vision. Indeed, he seems already to have sparked an incipient dialogue around that prospect.

By engaging the right on the meaning of the Constitution, Obama has broken new ground. For progressives, he has sketched a fresh template for countering their adversaries' long-unanswered constitutional narrative.